Building Capability

We design and deliver training programs that inspire and enable people to succeed in the increasingly connected, matrix, virtual and global organization. We build capability face-to-face, through webinar, online or in a blended format.

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Overview

Without these new skills people tend to continue to apply the techniques they developed in simpler times, and these techniques are often ineffective, expensive to apply and counter-productive.

We have identified six key areas where we need to build capability and skills to be successful in matrix, virtual and global working – the 6Cs. In each of these areas we have unique intellectual property and tools that have been validated around the world with hundreds of leading multinationals.

Context – Understand and embrace the rationale, differences and challenges of matrix, virtual or global working

Clarity – Create clarity and alignment when working in a complex team or structure. Deal with multiple reporting lines, multiple team membership and competing goals. Manage ambiguity, dilemmas and higher levels of conflict

Cooperation – Ensure complex teams and organizations stay both connected and effective, through simpler ways of working, better face-to-face and virtual meetings and faster decision making

Communication – Support communication and encourage participation and engagement through technology

Control – Find the right balance of control and trust. Build trust and create empowerment virtually, develop people, exercise control and manage accountability without control

Community – Develop, maintain and use a sense of community, stay visible and exercise influence without authority through your network and in a culturally diverse and distributed environment. Understand and manage national cultural differences

We produce tailored programs to meet your specific needs and audiences based on the challenges that are relevant to you. We can design programs targeted at the issues faced by executives, senior leaders, managers, team members or individual contributors. We deliver face-to-face, or through blended or fully virtual delivery (webinar and online learning).

Context

Understanding and embracing the rationale, differences and challenges of matrix, virtual or global working helps us accelerate the process of change, break down barriers to acceptance of new ways of working and improve confidence and engagement.

This helps with communication of the strategy and building common understanding of the change journey.

Clarity

The more that individuals are matrixed, the more they are to be concerned about a lack of clarity in their goals and roles. Multiple bosses and multiple team membership mean that we have to live with competing or even conflicting goals and need to prioritize constantly between them.

The individuals themselves may be the only people who are aware of these goal, alignment or prioritization challenges as their bosses and colleagues may only see part of the picture.

Decision rights can easily become unclear as everyone gets involved in everything. This can have a significant financial and motivational impact by delaying change, projects and other day to day activities.

The point of a multi-dimensional organization is to give us flexibility to balance the demands of the global, the local, the business unit, the function and geography. This inevitably leads to higher levels of ambiguity and the need to manage trade-offs, dilemmas and higher levels of conflict. We need to make sure people have the skills to manage this complexity effectively.

Cooperation

Teams, groups, networks and communities in complex organizations represent the soft structure we use to get things done. Collaboration becomes both more vital and more complex.

Networking is a key way of getting things done and we need to be able to establish and engage our networks effectively.

It is common for organizations to experience too much collaboration, too many teams and meetings and too many people involved in decisions. The collaborative overload falls most heavily on our high-performers.

The solution, as we become more connected, is at the same time to simplify the way we collaborate.

Traditional teamwork with its requirement for synchronous (same time) meetings and calls and high levels of interdependence is a complex and expensive way of getting things done globally or regionally. It tends to drive a lot of meetings, travel and collective decision-making. Simpler ways of working through groups, networks and communities can help you deliver faster and with improved engagement.

People work together across barriers of distance, cultures, time zones, technology and organizational complexity which increase the costs and difficulty of cooperation.

A lot of collaboration happens in face-to-face and virtual meetings. Our participants tell us that they spend on average 40% of their time in meetings (more for senior leaders) and that 50% of this time is unnecessary. This means that a day per week (over six weeks per year) of your most expensive and skilled people’s time is spent in unnecessary collaboration.

Meetings are also the number one driver of business travel so unnecessary meetings may be costing a large proportion of your corporate travel budget each year.

Communication

Leaders and team members need to integrate the right communication technologies into their communication plans, both to achieve the tasks and to inspire a sense of virtual team spirit and identity.

They also need the skills to use these tools effectively. Most people haven’t been trained in the communication technologies they use every day.

Many organizations have invested in tools like WebEx or Skype for business but many people just use these web tools to automate poor quality, boring presentations.

We concentrate on helping people build integrated communication plans using the right technology for the right task and in creating engaging face-to-face and virtual communication that gets the best out of each of the tools available.

Control

We collaborate with increasingly distributed and diverse groups of colleagues across functions, business units and geography. In this environment trust is both more essential and more difficult to build, maintain and repair. A high level of trust in teams correlates with retention, innovation, engagement and business performance.

Without high levels of trust managers often increase their level of control to cope with the discomfort of leading people they may not have formal reporting lines to and who they rarely meet. Finding the right balance of trust and control is a key challenge in complex organizations.

At the same time we still need to get things done with colleagues across distance, culture, time zones, working through technology and in complex organization structures. We need to be able to structure our work and deliver on time in this complex environment.

Inappropriate levels of control can lead to high levels of escalation, dis empowerment and frustration and can lead to micromanagement. All of these have an impact on engagement and retention.

Leaders need to exercise control and develop empowerment in a diverse environment where face-to-face time is seldom available.

Community

A sense of community, identity and belonging are essential to great teams and organizations.

In the past a sense of community and team spirit was a free by-product of people being in the same location. Today we need to build networks and communities that are not based on place.

Individuals in complex organizations need to balance divided loyalties to multiple bosses and several teams. They need to build and use networks to get things done and exercise influence without traditional authority. They need to be able to stay visible when working remotely.

We are building a sense of community with a much more diverse group of colleagues and need to understand and reconcile cultural differences in communication, collaboration and ways of working.

An understanding of cultural differences permeates all of our work. Nearly all of our client groups are multicultural so our tools are validated for international audiences and have been used successfully around the world. We can build an explicit understanding of the national cultural implications of the issues we discuss throughout our programs if this is relevant to you.

In over 22 years of working on these issues we have developed over 70 practical tools that can help leaders, teams and individuals overcome these issues. We also bring learning from working with over 300 of the world’s leading organizations and training over 100,000 people in this area.

If you call us to discuss your specific needs we can quickly put together a tailored program for you based on our existing intellectual property.